


X-Treme Office Hours

by NotQuiteHydePark



Category: X-Force (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: David Foster Wallace - Freeform, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 06:31:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18026561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotQuiteHydePark/pseuds/NotQuiteHydePark
Summary: This week's episode of "Jay and Miles X-plain the X-Men" requested an AU with Adam X the X-treme as an angsty literature professor. Here it is.





	X-Treme Office Hours

Professor Adam rubbed all four of his suede sleeve patches and swore slightly under his breath. He was looking at the department’s poster for his newest, coolest course, and it would never do. It was all wrong. Not “How to Be David Foster Wallace.” It was a class about Being. And being cool. And skateboarding, and chase scenes, and how to start plots that never end. And brooding. 

It was supposed to be “How to Be: David Foster Wallace.” Without the colon it just seemed…. weak. Adam would have to make up for it by bringing his skateboard to class. Would that be enough, though? Nothing was ever enough.

His office hours were almost over and no one had come this week, though term had just started. It was just as well. He needed all the research time he could patch together if he was ever going to find out where we all came from, what it was all about, why everything was so hard, so tough, so extreme.

He plucked one more long, blond hair out of his keyboard. The hairs were his own. They fell out a lot, but they grew back in. Sometimes he wondered whether, given how much testosterone he had, the hairs would fall out someday and never grow back. His levels of testosterone were extreme. But he told himself that they powered his research. He could discover it all if they just gave him time. But the faculty never gave him time. They never gave him enough time.

At least he had one piece for Notes and Queries that he could polish up and send off the next morning before sunrise. He had managed, he told himself to “find out who the name on this piece of paper is. Milbury.” He was a publisher who had worked with George Eliot briefly in the 1860s. His methods of distributing his circulating library were methods that Eliot and her partner John Henry Lewes had considered unethical. To Milbury, though, they were just extreme.

Adam took out a letter opener, and then another letter opener, and then a butter knife, and then a paring knife, from the bottom right drawer of his teak desk, the one where he kept all the knives. He put them into the pockets of his tweed jacket. He was always going through jacket pockets. He didn’t know why. Sometimes coins fell out of his pockets during class.

He taught literary theory. It was a popular class. He tried to sum it up with pithy slogans, and to keep the class involved. “Since these signs tell us up is down and left is right,” he had asked the students, “what do you suggest?” They just stared back at him. His eyes, he remembered flashed back at them. Maybe he was too intimidating. Or too extreme. 

He had to teach the class every year, due to budget cuts. “I’m doing it,” he told himself, “because I have no choice in the matter.” The department chair simply hadn’t given him one. He gritted his death and re-opened that book by Agamben, the one about how we are all exiles, how we all live outside the law.

Probably the chair had it in for him because he once fought for the old curriculum. He wanted those stories about the Great War, about survival in Alaska, about space, right out there where kids could read them. Kids needed those stories. Just like he needed his leather cap. There had been tea spilled in the lounge, and at one point a vote by secret ballot. His colleagues were shocked. “I do not fight—I have never fought—because I want to,” he had told them, enunciating very carefully, “but rather because I have to!”

A grinding noise brought him back to the present day, to this afternoon in his office, as it shook the wheels on his skateboard, the laces in his lace-up boots, the brim of his cap. All four of his CD players were playing at once: Foo Fighters and Operation Ivy and Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night and Korn. Some kind of electrical surge, he supposed. Maybe the groove created by all the music at once could help him stay in one place, focus, get back to the books in front of him. “I’m a traveler,” he said to himself. “A wanderer, searching for his home.” The music could take him there.

At least they let him teach his courses: David Foster Wallace, Heinlein, Jack London.

Professor Boomer Philip entered the cluttered office, nearly banging her head on the metal mobile, nearly tripping over the metal sculptures by the leather chair. “Can my wife ask you for help with a big lecture class next time she sees you?” the visitor opened. Boomer’s wife was a leading historian of America’s space program. “She’s only ever taught seminars and she’s gonna give that big lecture on NASA.” Boomer fingered the tiny metal figures on Adam’s desk. It was hard even now for her not to sneak them into her capacious purse.

“It never has been something I could truly appreciate, Philip,” Adam replied. “What good is it to be among the stars, to have seen the face of infinity, if you are empty inside your head?”

Professor Boomer Philip frowned. Her colleague was so frustrating: gentle and kind, at times, and full of energy to help others, but so, so self-absorbed. “Amara really could use your help,” she said.

“You needn’t be afraid,” Adam responded curtly. “I’m not the enemy.”

“You certainly acted like one at last week’s meeting,” Boomer said. “Why did you storm out like that? Why did you take the microphone? We could all hear you skateboarding home. All the Dean did was call you—“

“That’s not my name,” Adam said, putting his boots on the desk. All six of the suede patches on each of his trouser legs showed. They looked odd with the boots. His love for suede was extreme. “It’s what he calls me but it’s not my real name.”

“I agree that it was super-inappropriate,” she said, one hand making a fist. Sometimes she wanted to blow the whole place up. There was a student in the doorway, though, so she withdrew. He had a camera, a very sophisticated camera. Adam pulled his cap down over his eyes.

“We’ve come to take your picture for the student daily newspaper, Professor,” the camera-holder said. She looked almost in awe of Adam, of his swinging braids, his intense gaze, his ability to hold Agamben’s Homo Sacer in one hand and Infinite Jest in the other. “Your office is pretty dark, though.” Everything about this professor was dark. “Can we get out into the courtyard for some sunlight?”

“I’ll go back with you,” the professor said, rising to his feet and swaying slightly, making sure he knew the location of every book in the room. “Just don’t flash me. Please don’t flash me.” Natural light was always best.

Adam might be extreme, but he still tried to look out for the welfare of all college students, keeping their energy level high. He held out a tray of vitamin C gummies in the shape of a skateboard, and a six-pack of something that had to be designed to compete, in supermarkets, with Gatorade. “Electrolytes?” he asked. “Oxygenate your blood.”

“By the way, Adam,” Boomer added, “I’ve always wondered: what’s your connection to Xavier University, in Cinnicinnati? I always thought you did your undergrad degree in Canada, but you’ve certainly got a ton of Xavier branded stuff around here.” Was he Catholic? Did he have family in Ohio? She was simply sick of just not knowing. There was so much he never told anyone.

But she had set him off. He had to pick up his cousin’s sister’s kid’s dog in ten minutes, and he had a lot of Wallace to get through. And yet she couldn’t leave until he, as assistant dean for special projects, had signed the real estate papers. “Can you just sign these?” she asked, quietly.

“Not until the deeds are done!” he said.

“They’re done,” she announced, as softly as she could. Adam would have to live in the new dorm for the first year; the idea was that he’d keep the students comfortable, although his colleagues felt, to put it mildly, iffy about the plan.

“I could be giving up the only chance I’ve ever had,” he said, taking his fountain pen out of his hat, “to get my life squared away!”

“I know,” said his colleague. “But we’re teachers first. Don’t you think you can handle living there for a year?”

He rolled his eyes and smirked, “I’ll need a couple of days, a pot of coffee and a couple of extra guards.”

Clearly he thought of himself as the man for the job. He would take dorm living for adults to an extreme. But Professor Boomer Philip had one more item on her agenda before they met again. She turned, on her way out, and lifted up her citrine transition lenses, and said the most provocative, divisive, and indeed extreme thing she—as an administrator, could say: “what do you think we should do about the budget cuts?”

Adam rose to his full height, lifting his beige briefcase, stuffed with the papers he’d have to take home: the number of papers he’d have to grade was extreme. He looked her in the eye, until he knew they were both thinking budgets, courseloads, the adjunct crisis, the future of higher education in the country they had both learned to call home. The crisis of higher education was extreme. He said what he felt. “It would be best if you allowed this ridiculous situation to mercifully end!”

**Author's Note:**

> Everything Adam says is something that Adam X the X-Treme says, verbatim, in 1990s comics (X-Force Annual 2, X-Force 29-30, or X-Men 38, 39 and 41).
> 
> The one David Foster Wallace scholar I know well in real life is nothing like Adam X; he's sweet, brilliant, and deserves better than to think he's referenced in here in the x-tremely unlikely event that he reads it.


End file.
